Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
July 9, 2026
This is the second in the new MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS book excerpt series. The first one, Release Your Self from the Hypnotic Power of Words, was published on June 5.
Humans come into the world. We find out certain things: for example, we find out that fire burns us. This “finding out” we call knowing: when someone has a true picture in his or her mind— “true” meaning that the picture corresponds to the external reality—we call this knowing. So, if we have a picture in our mind of fire burning our hand, we say that we know that fire can burn us.
So far, language does not yet exist. We can know without language by holding true images in our mind. There is no “believing.” “Believing” comes into the picture when language is invented.
With language, one person who knows something can pass on this knowledge to another person who has not yet discovered it for themself. The latter person, in accepting the former’s knowledge as true, “believes” it. As we all now know, this “believing” often leads to the holding of untrue pictures in people’s minds.
The cure is to cut down on believing—tend to only hold pictures in one’s mind of the things one has seen oneself.
Belief was never much of an issue before words.
Belief = be lief = be for me. I believe him = he be’s for me on that. He was there. He saw it. He sees it for me. He sees it—I see him see it.
Cosmic humor: Most belief is founded on the form, not the content, of the words believed in.
Disidentifying with the feeling of belief
At almost every instant, you are likely to experience the feeling about a given postulate: “It is so.” Look for that feeling, and when it arises, remind yourself: “It may not be so.” Be willing to act based on your judgment as to whether something is more likely to be true or to be not true; but do not believe that it is either true or not true. In this way, belief is unnecessary to action.
Be especially wary of the feeling of belief at times when you have a thought and then do not contradict it. Simply, the experience of non-contradiction suggests to the belief program that it energizes itself. Thus, you must guard against the tendency to believe any thought you generate. This can best be done by remembering to say to yourself (but not in words), “It may not be so” in response to every thought.
The definition of Truth at the intellectual level is what can be made to sound reasonable based on the words you use. Intellectual reason can find some truth and some falsity in every statement, depending upon how it is interpreted.
The definition of Truth at the action level is what works when you actually try it in reality . . . i.e., what the universe reinforces.
We need to make action decisions each second. We need to make intellectual statements a few times a day. The two are usually unrelated.
Few people living in the Scientific Age have realized that the Scientific Method can be applied to Life . . .
Mind Experiment
What do you believe?
List your beliefs on one or several sheets of paper using only the left-hand side of the page. (Or on your laptop or tablet if you prefer. We recommend paper, so you don’t need to bother with formatting, auto-correct, etc.) Use question marks next to any beliefs you’re not sure you fully believe.
If you’re not sure where to start, you might start with beliefs about God, an afterlife, the purpose of life, and what is good and what is bad.
Where did they come from? Why do (did)
I believe that?
In this game, one remembers where each belief came from.
Easy if you take them slowly, one at a time.
No longer needing to have beliefs
In this stage, one faces the situation of no longer really having any beliefs, yet realizes that this is true freedom to learn. Often accompanied by brief ecstasy.
It may not be so.
To do this experiment, simply pick a period of time, and in that time watch your thoughts, remembering to realize that each thought might be right or it might be wrong.
This is one of the most universal forms of meditation.
The way it usually goes, you keep getting sucked into identifying with some thought or another and forget to doubt it—then catch yourself and back out of auto-agreement with the thought.
Over time, you begin to see how your idea-generation process, your conviction-decision process, and your other mental processes work. Then you will have control over these processes rather than being controlled by them.
Love to all,
